Emergent Narratological Explanatory Frames: From (non)naturalness to (non)standardness (the case of haiku-like narratives)

University of Zaragoza

In my 2008 contribution to Theorizing Narrativity, I
discussed the issue of non-standard narrativity, and I exemplified my point by
means of an analysis of Vladimir Nabokov’s and Ernest Hemingway’s highly
stylized brands of literary narrativity. I preferred the terms “standard” vs.
“non-standard” to Fludernik’s 1996 terms “natural” vs. “non-natural” and to
Richardson’s (cf. Alber et al. 2010) term “unnatural.” I explained
Nabokov´s narrativity as non-standard due to its marked preference for
the horizontal displacement of the core story from the textual center to the
margins, while I characterized Hemingway’s non-standardness as a marked
preference for top-to-bottom “iceberg” narrativity, one which leaves the core
story submerged while a more trivial one surfaces in the text. In both cases,
the reader must engage the text from an active writerly position and risk the
dangers of over-interpretation. I used the expressions “standard narrativity”
and “standard narrative” (as opposed to non-standard narrativity/narrative) to
characterize a way of emplotment which deviates from the pattern of
expectations created by readerly narratives of the well-made, well-told,
realist novel[1] type. Narratives articulating
characters’ and narrators’ voices in ways other than realist I would also call
non-standard, but at a different narratological level than emplotment.

The aim of this paper is to explore two types of narrative, one
standard, the other non-standard, which I propose as the most appropriate
distinction for cultural narratological analysis. Now as regards defining
narratives as “natural” (or “non-natural”) and calling, accordingly, for a
natural narratology or an unnatural narratology, I wish to stress the following
two points:

there is nothing natural about narrative;

narrative is perfectly natural.

The term natural is ambiguous, for it means different things in 1)
and in 2) and should thus not be used indiscriminately in narratology. By
natural in 1) is meant “not constructed,” “not symbolic.” A narrative text is
the product of an elaborate process of patterning and compositional pattern
recombination subject to specific generic norms, and it is open to particular
innovations of design, addressing somebody. From this point of view, narrative
cannot be considered natural because there is nothing that is not “constructed”
in a narrative. The term natural here has no opposite, but is rather part of a
gradient that goes from more to less natural according to other considerations
such as quality and degree of literary elaboration or dual foregrounding. On
the other hand, there comes a cluster of quasi-synonyms, including
“unsophisticated,” “everyday life” and “spontaneous,”[2]
that reduces the definition to a vague conceptualization of a narrative as more
or less natural. (1)

In a concept of natural according to sense (1) that integrates
these synonymous meanings, it would make sense, up to a certain point, to say
that oral narratives are more casual and less thought-out and thus more natural
than written narratives, or that folktales are more natural than the
sophisticated narratives of high culture, and so on. In any case, approaching
narrative as never being totally natural is compatible both with formalist
theories of narrative, which are more attuned to narrative pattern – everyday
vs. literary product design – and with sociopragmatic theories of the
Bakhtinian kind in which a distinction is drawn between primary and secondary speech
genres, as we will see later. Moreover, given that design is bound to human
agency and selection within a range of options that are not only individual,
but also social- and culture-specific and therefore not universal, the term
natural may also apply to other approaches to the study of narrative. For
instance, “natural” narrative might appear in the context of cultural
narratology for want of specific critical terms. The refunctionalization of
such a protean term can only lead to an increase of its already high level of
ambiguity. In that context, using the term “standard” would be preferable.

By natural in (2) is meant that the capacity to narrate and
produce narratives is wired into the anthroposemiotic hardware of the newborn.
The meaning of natural in this second sense is “in-born” or perhaps “innate”:
narrative is connatural to human communication and, vice versa, human
communication is connaturally narrative. Natural in this second primary meaning
means “universal,” as when we say that the capacity to tell/narrate a story is
universal, equally as natural and universal as our capacity to use language.[3]
The expression “natural narrative” may appear in discussions among cognitivist
and evolutionary narratologists, but the meaning will differ from the cultural
narratologist’s use of the term.

To sum up, the essential difference between the homonymous
natural (1) and natural (2) corresponds to “spontaneously occurring activity”
and “innate competence,” respectively. Natural 1) underlines diversity:
narrative storytelling is a discrete activity that, according to context of
situation and culture, can occur more or less spontaneously and produce diverse
storytelling forms and patterns, from the culturally standard to the
non-standard. Natural 2) underlines unicity: narrative storytelling is a
universal, general human cognitive-communicative competency. As homonymy is a
potential source of misunderstanding and ambiguity and should be avoided in the
context of scientific language, my suggestion, at this point, is that for
natural 1) the term ‘standard’ should be adopted together with its variants
‘non-standard’, ‘substandard’, ‘supra-standard’. Whereas natural and unnatural
are related to cognitive criteria, standard and non-standard are semiotic. Since
the two approaches – natural, standard – start out with different premises,
they, and their terminologies, must not be confused.

Once the distinction between the two usages of natural has been
made clear, the radical ambiguity of the term, when used both in its positive
and negative variants (natural/unnatural) to refer to narrativity from
perspectives 1) and 2), becomes clear. In Fludernik (2012), commenting on Alber
et al. (2012), a good example can be found of the problematic consequences that
applying ambiguous and equivocal terminology can lead to in narratological
discussion. Fludernik’s perceptive critique of unnatural narratology insists on
the need to agree on the meaning of the metalanguage used by Alber et al.
(2010) and herself in earlier work. Had the meta-terms natural
(non-natural/unnatural) not been used in all their different double senses by
both Fludernik and Alber et al., there would have been no reason for discussion
and criticism. In other words, as the example shows, it is the inadequacy of
the metalanguage that creates a problem where, normally, there is none.

My suggestion is that cultural narratology will benefit from applying the relevant
findings of earlier and present-day scholarship and moving on to consider why
the terms standard vs. non-standard are preferable to natural and non-natural.
Standard vs. non-standard are well-defined concepts within both socio-pragmatic
linguistics and cultural semiotics. Standard bears on linguistic and
sociosemiotic phenomena in relation to textual meaning and value against a
hierarchical diversity of norms that regulate their form and use in the
semiosphere (Lotman 1981). This diversity is a basic phenomenon within the
semiosphere and results in complex articulation. On the one hand, diversity is
articulated polyphonically within texts and contexts – the contexts of culture
and situation (cf. Malinowski 1935; Halliday 1978) in which the standards of
behavior of the members of a community are defined. On the other hand,
diversity is articulated through the forces of heteroglossia within a complex
socio-linguistic context in which the standard variety of a language is
inscribed as having a specific symbolic value within the surrounding diversity,
both intralinguistic and interlinguistic. From my point of view, which is
Bakhtinian on this matter, narrative should be viewed under the same
theoretical lens of systemic diversity.

Narrative is a form of communicative behavior that takes place in
a culturally positioned community. Through the lens of cultural semiotics, we
can see that narratives that seem natural are in fact those that fit the norms
prevalent within a group in a given space and at a given time. From this
perspective, narratives are standard when they are predicated on shared
knowledge and expectations. That certain narratives are standard means that
they are centrally located within a culture and a genre in which other kinds of
narrative may be less central and thus non-standard.[4]
For a variety of reasons, such non-standard forms may even be marginal, such as
supra-standard or sub-standard narratives whose symbolic value and social
relevance cannot be adequately determined with reference to the standard
criteria. We will see an example of this from Japanese culture in part 3 of the
present contribution. The specifically dual (Sino-Japanese) origin of Japanese
culture is replicated in the Japanese narrative standard, the pattern of which
differs substantially from western narrative standards, thus calling into
question the notion of narrative universality.

Cultural-social semiotics considers, firstly, diversity to be a
basic within the semiosphere and, secondly, that systemic complexity results
from the (inter)textual and (inter)medial integration of this structural
diversity. From these premises it can be assumed that, already within a given
narratological semiosphere, no matter whether eastern or western, narrative is
subject to different parameters of intrageneric diversification: just as
language, narratives vary according to place, time, user, genre, medium, social
group and culture. As I have argued elsewhere (Penas-Ibáñez
1996), we are indebted to Mikhail Bakhtin ([1937] 1981, 1986) for drawing
attention to diversity as a constitutive textual and cultural factor. He
changed patterns of thought and research on narrative by introducing the idea
that a text is translinguistic, an utterance made up of many utterances,
because “actual meaning is understood against the background of other concrete
utterances on the same theme, a background made up of contradictory opinions,
points of view and value judgements” (Bakhtin [1937] 1981: 281). As Bakhtin
puts it: “The word cannot be assigned to a single speaker. The author (speaker)
has his own inalienable right to the word, but the listener also has his
rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes
upon it also have their rights (after all there are no words that belong to no
one)” (Bakhtin 1986: 121). Indeed, it was Bakhtin who conceived the text as
being an intertextual, intersubjective and intercultural utterance, thus
placing social diversity at the root of social semiotics. Todorov makes the
clarifying remark that (according to Bakhtin) “No utterance is devoid of the
intertextual dimension” (Todorov [1981] 1984: 62), even though Bakhtin never
used the term intertextuality, Julia Kristeva’s 1967 coinage for Bakhtin’s
concept of dialogism (60). For Yuri Lotman as well, diversity, or organic
heterogeneity within the system, is an essential feature of the semiosphere.
Lotman’s term semiosphere is analogous to Vernadsky’s term biosphere so that,
according to Lotman ([1981] 2005), just as the biosphere is a space filled with
the totality of living organisms, considered an organic unity of living matter,
so “The semiotic universe may be regarded as the totality of individual texts
and isolated languages as they relate to each other” (Lotman [1984] 2005: 208).
In his later work Lotman (1990) reiterated that heterogeneity is one among
other fundamental organizing principles of the semiosphere, but his last work
(1992) focused essentially on heterogeneity: “The relationship between
multiplicity and unity is a fundamental characteristic of culture” (Lotman
[1992] 2009: 3).

Despite these major breakthroughs, there remains much to be done
in the study of narrative as a semiosphere, i.e. a system of subsystems of
signification, a system of sign-paths that can be trodden top-to-bottom (from
the context of culture to contextualized narrative utterances) or bottom-up
(from token utterances to culture). Here Lotman’s groundbreaking theorization
of culture as the realm of semiosis can be compared to Bakhtin’s theorization
of the social utterance and the novel. Culture, for Lotman, is always to be
understood as intercultural (through his concept of hybridity) just as, for
Bakhtin, the text is always intertextual (through his concept of
heteroglossia); moreover, in modern philosophical and philological
hermeneutics, subjectivity is always intersubjective (Merleau-Ponty 1945;
Ricœur 1975). Only along these lines can communities and their members
communicate among themselves and with others in ever-changing ways that affect
intercultural and intracultural transfer. One of the salient effects of this
transfer is the hybridization of narrative forms. As I have recently proposed,
Lotman’s concept of hybridity is better understood in association with Garvin’s
concept of standardness whereby hybridization results from processes of
cultural contact that can only occur against the backdrop of an existing
diversity within which the standard forms serve as the cultural norm and
referential locus of difference (cf. Penas-Ibáñez 2013).

Narratology has developed from its classical formulations. It can
even be said that classical narratology has been supplanted by quite a few
“narratologies,” among them the above-mentioned natural and unnatural
narratologies, feminist narratology, evolutionary narratology, etc. Although
socioculturally aware, most of these narratologies do not account for the
differences and similarities between diverse narrative standards and their
variations across time, space and cultures – variations that are in no way
attributable to a lack of naturalness. For instance, Fludernik’s model aims to
“supply key conceptualizations for the study of all types of narrative”
(Fludernik [1996] 2001: 15), but it focuses only on western forms of
storytelling, mainly English, but also German and Spanish. Philology has
explained the genesis of narrative in the west as developing from the epic
genre and historiography. These sources have left an indelible mark on the
classical narratological analysis of what a “normal” form of narrative is and
how essential a specific kind of action, plot and (character’s vs. narrator’s)
voice are for that form to be called narrative of the standard kind.
Narratological inquiry based on the premise of either the “naturalness” or
“unnaturalness” of a particular narrative format becomes blind to its own
ethnocentric bias by disregarding the implications of cultural diversity in the
constitution of narrative. The essentialism of such a line of inquiry puts it
at the disadvantage of having to explain the paradox of, on the one hand,
postulating as natural a langue-like abstract narrative structure – be
it (spontaneous) oral or (literary) written – while on the other hand having to
postulate as respectively non-natural or unnatural the diverse phenomenal forms
of narrative structures that do not comply with the abstract model.

2.1. A cultural-semiotic approach
to the dynamics of standardization.

Peirce – Bakhtin – Garvin – Lotman

The awkwardness of such explanations can be obviated by
acknowledging the socio-cultural and temporal relativity of a narrative form’s
standardness. Allowing for narrative to meet a diversity of standards with
regard to time, place and culture thus rules out lines of inquiry predicated on
a universal narrative form that would make some literary narratives
natural/non-natural (Fludernik) and others anti-mimetic/unnatural (Richardson’s
group). According to Fludernik, “Fictional experiments that manifestly exceed
the boundaries of naturally occurring story(telling) situations are, instead,
said to employ non-natural schemata” (12, original emphasis). The
fictional experiments she speaks about must be in a textual form if they are to
be accessed via cognitive schemata, whether these fictions are natural or
non-natural. Thus in the end, the statement that, in her model, “The term ‘natural’
is not applied to texts or textual techniques but exclusively to the cognitive
frames by means of which texts are interpreted” (12, original emphasis) renders
the model hermeneutically descriptive while narratologically emptied of its
analytical force. On the other hand, unnatural narratology concerns itself with
literary narrative forms that deviate from mimetic realist narrative, thus
elevating mimetic realist narrative to the counterpoint position of natural
abstract negative model. I am aware that this is Richardson’s own understanding
of unnatural while others, particularly his fellow unnatural narratologists,
may understand the term differently. Richardson acknowledges the key issue that
“each of us [unnatural narratologists] has a slightly different conception of
the unnatural” (Richardson 2013: 101), without really considering this a
problem.

In place of these paradigms, we
might adopt Paul Garvin’s (1979, 1981) notions of sign system, structure,
esthetic function, standardness and high versus folk culture. These criteria
help to throw light on a cultural-semiotic dynamics in which the center of the
semiosphere is the locus of standard (dominant) signifying practices while
other kinds of signifying practices are pushed to marginal positions that may,
in lay parlance, pass for unnatural but that, technically speaking, are
non-standard, perhaps also including substandard and possibly superstandard
techniques.

It is not surprising, then, that
with respect to different literary and other artistic genres and traditions,
western classical narratology is biased by its own specialization in the
observation and analysis of narrative works belonging mainly to the western
literary canon. Forms of narrating that have become standard in the west have
given birth to their own intertextual progeny by diverse types of imitation
(formal or thematic), hybridization, or by deviation (formal or thematic).
Brian McHale denounces for us the consequences of this bias. In a recent
article, McHale reflects critically on the problems posited by his own 1980s
universalist account of postmodern narrative: “Western theorists, including me,
constructed theories of postmodernism using exclusively Western models,
ignoring so-called ‘Third World’ cultures generally and Asian cultures in
particular” (McHale 2013: 359).

McHale’s acknowledgment of western-centrism as a bias in classical
narratology underscores the need for revising central theoretical and critical
tenets, especially the tendency to adopt a type of narrative – the well-made
nineteenth-century novel of western realism – as a universal model of
naturalness from which other forms of narrative deviate as unnatural. This
biased attention to western realist narrative models can be accounted for in
terms of a broader bias: the linguistic “turn” taken by the humanities in the
second half of the last century and, more specifically, by a narratology
derived from Saussurean semiology and its Barthesian poststructural
developments.

As is well-known, for semiologists in this tradition, lalangue
(versus la parole) is an abstract theoretical principle. Moreover, it
becomes practically conflated with the educated linguistic norm in a community,
one which has been standardized on the basis of its written form and whose
normalization contributes to its naturalization. Saussure is aware of the
paradox, for he observes:

Everywhere we are confronted with a dilemma: if we fix our
attention on only one side of each problem, we run the risk of failing to
perceive the dualities pointed out above; on the other hand, if we study speech
from several viewpoints simultaneously, the object of linguistics appears to us
as a confused mass of heterogeneous and unrelated things […] As I see it there
is only one solution to all the foregoing difficulties: from the very outset
we must put both feet on the ground of language and use language as the norm of
all other manifestations of speech. […] speech is many-sided and
heterogeneous […] we cannot put it into any category of human facts, for we
cannot discover its unity.

Language, on the contrary, is a self-contained whole and a
principle of classification. (Saussure in Taylor 1986: 142, original emphasis).

Langue, the norm, is supposedly shared as the native speaker’s natural means of communication within
and across national borders. But this quite paradoxical understanding of la
langue overlooks the pragmatic issues associated with performance.[5]
What I have in mind in particular are issues of power and national
identity, a blind spot of post-Saussurean developments that has been addressed
by sociopragmatics and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Garvin (1964),
Fishman (1968), Halliday (1978), van Dijk (1977), Mey (1979) and Fairclough
(1992), among others, question the adequacy of the Saussurean linguistic model
on account both of its theory of the sign as bipartite (signifier and signified
are not connected through an interpretant – the Peircean third) and of its
definition of la langue as opposed to la parole. This opposition
burdens the theory of parole by the tendency to connect the particular
system – a specific langue of a language – to the parole of that
language via the standard educated variety as if shared naturally by all the
members of a speech community. It is clear that the standard is just another
variety among varieties of a language, not the language as such. The standard
variety is also the language of power, and it is always easier for the sons and
daughters of the educated classes to learn than for lower segments of society.
CDA had a precedent in Bernstein’s (1964) sociolinguistic research on
“elaborated” versus “restricted” codes and school performance examined the
problem, in a way, by defining the standard as an elaborated code, one which
felt natural only to those who were born into it. For those born into an
uneducated milieu, the restricted code was the natural one, so that they needed
to learn the elaborated code of their own language nearly as they would a
second language, overcoming a similar degree of strangeness and difficulty. So
for Bernstein there were different norms for differently educated classes who
regarded different varieties of language as natural.

The conflation of the concepts of la langue (often
translated into English as “language” or as “standard English,” “standard
French,” etc.) has caused a certain amount of confusion in linguistic research,
leading sociolinguists to abandon the term “language” due to its lack of
precision. However, the term “dialect” has both a general and a strict sense.
In its general sense, dialect is used to mean “any” sociolectal variety of a
language that can be defined on the basis of stable classificatory
characteristics of the language user, while in its strict sense it means just
“any geographical variety of a language.” One grammatical effect of the
vagueness of “language” is that it can be used periphrastically both in
collocations such as “national language” or “natural language” in which
language refers to an object of linguistic study and, metaphorically, in
expressions like “the language of flowers” or “film language.”

This consideration of the potentially blinding effects of biased
linguistic categories can open the narratologist’s eyes to one basically
undesirable effect of extending linguistic theory focused on the study of langue
to the study of narrative. Considering one type of narrative (whether oral or
literary) and its narrativity as the natural norm is an extrapolation in terms
of la langue that leads to focus on the language of narrative rather
than on its textuality (intertexts and context included), and to maintain
concepts of “narrative” and “narrativity” that are context-blind and
universalizing. This critique has been increasingly recognized over the past
fifteen years. For instance, Nünning (2003) establishes the difference
between classical and post-classical narratology along similar lines by saying
that classical narratology is “text-centered” (langue) and postclassical
narratology “context-oriented” (parole). I agree with what Nünning
intended to say but not with a terminology that places the text on a level with
langue. In a post-Bakhtinian, postclassical frame, the text is an
utterance that cannot be reduced to la langue and, as parole, is
anchored in its context. In Nünning’s article, text is meant to refer
specifically to linguistic texture without its contextual intertextual
dimension. My rewording would be that classical narratology is semiologically
centered and the product of the last century’s “linguistic turn” while
post-classical narratology is socio-semiotically oriented and the product of a
relatively recent “cultural turn” in the humanities.

A narratology grounded in
cultural semiotics, rather than in Saussurean semiology, considers that
narrative norms or standards are culture-bound. Within any one culture,
different kinds of narratives are produced according to a diversity of contexts
of situation (Malinowsky 1935; Halliday 1978): according to mode (written,
spoken, multimedia narratives), tenor (degree of formality of the narrative)
and field (a specific kind of genre differentiation according to subject
matter: travel narratives, war narratives, westerns, etc.), but also according
to diverse subcultural contexts whose textual articulation incorporates the
following cultural differences:

Within the context of this paper,
one of the most relevant effects of complex subcultural differentiation along
the esthetic parameter 4) is the difference between artistic (literary) and
non-artistic (non-literary) texts.

Regarding the latter kind of texts, we must look back again to
Garvin (1981) who applies Jan Mukařovský’s ([1932] 1964) definition
of double foregrounding in literature to all the arts, adding that expectancies
are not identical for all members even of a given cultural community, much less
universally valid. While Mukařovský differentiates between everyday
expectancies and a given esthetic canon in order to explain dual foregrounding
in the high arts, Garvin points out that both everyday expectancies and the
esthetic canon are culturally defined in an anthropological sense. In other
words, there is nothing universal about expectancies. Even the so-called
universal values of the high arts are universal only to the extent that they
have been “universalized” or spread to a broader cultural setting, for instance
from western to eastern culture or vice versa, as we shall see in part 3 of the
present work. Standardization and globalization are interrelated semiotic
processes whose dynamics depends on the existence of intracultural and
intercultural diversity and contact. Literary renewal (aesthetic creativity)
relies not only on individual agency and the existence of dual foregrounding
within a given literary tradition, but also on free intercultural borrowing and
transfer which makes it possible for double foregrounding to operate across
different literary traditions and enables cultural hybridization.
Hybridization, as we have stressed before, can take place only on the basis of
an existing contrast between diverse different standards
(Penas-Ibáñez 2013).

With these considerations in mind, what now is meant by “standard
narrative”? It can be defined as the contextualized form/meaning template that
seems to be normal (in the sense of “the most widely expected”) for a
particular set of communicative functions and for a particular community. It is
normal not because it is natural but because it is so expectable that it “feels
natural.” Or to put it another way: it is a pattern of meaning standardly
addressed to listeners/readers that is readily recognizable as a narrative and
widely circulated within a given community for a particular purpose. In other
words, a standard narrative is a variety of narrative that has become the
standard through a process of standardization, a process that has been well
studied in Prague School semiotics and its aftermath. According to Garvin,
several conditions must be met in order for a variety of a language to “become”
standard. In my analysis, these same conditions of standardization also pertain
to the textual generic variety called narrative.

1) A variety must have been selected
from a preexistent diversity before it becomes the norm. In this particular
case, the discourse patterns of the western nineteenth-century realist novel
have become standard and, as such, have been singled out as the object of much
western classical narratological study. The considerable amount of research
devoted to modernist and (late-) post-modernist narrative is witness to the
similarities and differences between them and the earlier realist model.

2)
The selected variety must be codified.
In the case of the well-made narrative, codification has taken place through
formal analysis and isolation of the composition rules and structural
components of the well-made realist narrative. Classical narratology has been
instrumental in codifying the standard written narrative. But there are also
other codifying agencies: linguistics has contributed especially to the codification
of standard oral narrative, and much popular literature is written following
recipes provided by publishing houses inspired by market surveys and using
their own best-selling standard formulas.

3) That variety must undergo re-elaboration.
The western nineteenth-century realist narrative model resurfaces in a
plurality of texts, not only in later realist fiction but also in the
non-fictional narratives of journalism and historiography that conform to the
realist style. In addition, we find a richly elaborated modernist,
postmodernist and late cosmodernist (D’haen 2013) proliferation of narratives
whose relation to nineteenth-century realism has been amply discussed in terms
of deviational intertextual filiation. Postmodern narratives can be called “unnatural”
by Richardson (instead of non-standard) only by postulating a deviational
relation with supposedly antecedent “natural” models.

4) That variety must be implemented.
Implementation takes place through institutional agencies that favor
this very same process by focusing on the standard variety of narrative which
ends up being perceived as the prestigious “norm” and the canonical one. Here
we can mention the long-standing tradition of academic and critical focus on
standard narrativity and the literary canon as well as editorial and publishing
policies, the very selective practice of “fluent” translation of non-western
narrative (cf. Venuti 1995), the national and international literary award
system, the monitoring role of reviewers, literary circles and cliques, among
the most important implementing agencies.

The process of standardization affects both the production and the
reception of narrative. If there are differences regarding the way in which the
process takes place in eastern and western cultures, as we posit in the
following sections, then this will be noticeable in the differential form shown
by the narrative standard products resulting from them. The individual producer
operates at level 3), the level of (re)elaboration in the overall process of
standardization. Here, the creative writer’s task usually involves inventing
personal forms of telling (writing) stories that may be unexpectedly new, that
is, non-standard to begin with, just as a matter of authorial choice and style.
Nonetheless, these idiosyncratic narratives are part of the same dynamics of
literary standardization that will normalize or naturalize them over time and
make them canonical in some cases. This exemplifies why the standardization
process is historical and dialectical. From the vantage point of individual
writer/reader (or teller/listener) expectations, the introduction of novel
narrative features is a technical resource that introduces a measure of
unexpectedness. The unexpected can perhaps be attributed to narrative sophistication,
defamiliarization or a strangeness of design relative to the established norm
within a specific textual tradition and a particular sociocultural milieu. But
it should not be called either unnatural or non-natural. In Japanese
literature, this particular aspect of the process differs from that in the
west. The elusive role of individual creativity in the standardization process
is highly characteristic of Sino-Japanese aesthetics and culture whose relation
of continuity with tradition – dual Sino-Japanese anchorage – provides
stability to the literary system while promoting a highly hybrid/syncretic
narrative standard that is distinctly Japanese.

When narratological enquiry gains awareness of the sociocultural
semiotic standardization process in its entirety, then the normal standard
narrative within a community, a culture-bound semiotic construct, will not
easily be misconstrued in terms of the natural narrative.

2.2. Standardization in the west:
the role of individual creativity

For Garvin (1981), who follows Havránek (1932) and
Mukařovský ([1932] 1964) on these matters, literary narratives are
esthetic objects whose esthetic nature is manifested through dual
foregrounding, as opposed to automatization. By ‘foregrounding’ is meant unexpectedness,
that is, ‘esthetic’ equals ‘the unexpected’ that calls attention to itself by
existing against a background of expectancies embodied in the standard object.
As Garvin puts it: “Automatization refers to the stimulus normally
expected in a social situation; foregrounding – in Czech aktualisace
– on the other hand, refers to a stimulus not culturally expected in a social
situation and hence capable of provoking special attention.” (Garvin 1964:
viii, original emphasis). The immediate effect of foregrounding is to draw
attention to the unexpected in the text, therefore to the individual text
itself and to the individual text producer. But this effect ultimately results
in “some further effect upon the cultural community which responds to it”
(Garvin 1981: 103), thus opening the text up to its cultural context. In
Lotmanian (1981, [1984] 2005) terms, the overarching sphere in which an
esthetic or literary narrative can be understood as such and acquire
meaningfulness is culture or the semiosphere, which requires culture-bound
specification for any narrative standard: sign relations and their
interpretation are dependent on a particular tradition and culture so that
interpreted meaning/form – and this includes narrative meaning/form – is
neither strictly textual nor strictly personal or subjective because narrative
does not exist only at level 3) of the historical dynamics of standardization
necessary within a culturally diverse context.

This theoretical vantage point on narrative and the literary
semiosphere provides awareness of cultural diversity and of the role played by
standardization in dynamizing intracultural literary relations as well as
intercultural literary transfer and hybridization (Penas-Ibáñez
2013). It also provides a well-balanced basis on which to analyze and explain
narrative textual phenomena within a theoretical and metatheoretical framework
well suited to the task. The cognitive-linguistic notion of ‘naturalness’ is
specific to its own field and, when extended to the field of narratology, it
should be reformulated in terms of the well-tested socio-semiotic concepts of
standardness and non-standardness. Working within this framework, it is also
possible to examine the history of western literary culture and see it
developing from folk to urban and from low to high culture. Popular language
and literature in the western semiosphere developed among the less cultivated
and privileged social groups, largely ignored by the elite classes. It is at
the beginning of early modernity, with the rise of standard languages and high
art and literature, that European national communities gained a sense of
differential identity that affirmed itself on the basis of the pride and
prestige symbolically embodied by these high culture phenomena. Western
modernization involves a process of development from low to high, from country
to town, from monarchy to democracy, from local to global, from non-standard to
standardizing national formations. This directional process has generally been
regarded as progressive and modernizing. The role of revolutions and
enlightened ideology in the modernization of the west has affected our
perception of the past. The enlightenment, with its critique of obscurantism,
brought about the French revolution and an intellectual atmosphere contrary to
old regime values for their lack of egalitarianism, liberty and fraternity. The
age of reason inaugurated a phase in European modernity that lasted a century
at the end of which reason was questioned in a critique that subverted and
deconstructed reason. We are heirs to an ideological frame of mind that praises
novelty for novelty’s sake, change for the sake of change, as if all things
past need to be associated with backwardness and conservatism, those two great
cultural fears of the western mind.

As a corollary, we find that western narratives of nationhood and
modernity are narratives of progress. Our narratives of narrative are also
narratives of progress – progress from oral to written, from modernity to
post-modernity. It thus seems necessary to look at the narratives of nation and
of narrative born in other cultures in order to see whether or not the
narratologist can generalize by concluding 1) that there is one kind of
narrative deserving the name of ‘universally standard’ and 2) that an analogous
process of standardization of narrative takes place in different literary
semiospheres.

The history of Japanese society and culture is quite different
from that of the west. In Japan the formation of a narrative standard followed
a process characterized by its idiosyncratic integration of duality along the
four steps of the standardization process: selection, codification, elaboration
and implementation. The selection and codification of a narrative variety that
eventually became standard was made from two sources that were integrated
within the narrative text by way of juxtaposition rather than replacement
(Chinese/High literary narratives and autochthonous/Low Japanese popular
narratives). Codification was dual, for Japanese narrative juxtaposed image and
word, showing and telling, prose and poetry, subjective and objective points of
view, fiction and fact, thus erasing the liminal borders of western
narratological categories used in the classification of realisms. Sylvie Patron
(in the present volume) has underlined the lack of perfect fit between Japanese
and western narratological concepts on a translational basis. Iwamatsu Masahiro
(also in the present volume) confirms the point both on a translational and
cultural basis by taking into account the culturally diglossic distribution of
Chinese and Japanese in Japan. Historically, Chinese was the language used for
theory in Japan, and thus Japanese narratology is doubly dependent on
translation. A concept taken from a western language is understood through a
Chinese term before it can become a Japanese term. The translated Japanese term
and text can scarcely be expected to be equivalent to the original
narratological concept. From the point of view of the present research, the
lack of fit between Japanese and western narratological concepts also needs to
be explained on the basis of the existence of a Japanese-specific
standardization process based on the synchretization of dual polarities in the
Japanese narrative standard. In other words, it is the western
conceptualization of subjective/objective, natural/cultural, poetry/narrative,
fact/fiction as polarities that makes the standard Japanese narrative seem
non-standard to western eyes and the Japanese translation of western
narratological terms fuzzy to the Japanese.

Besides selection and codification, elaboration of the Japanese
standard has also been dual in that the same “haikai imagination” and
esthetic (Shirane 1998) imbued two different genres: haibun (prose)
narrative and waka, renga and haiku (poetry) writing.
Implementation has been dual as well, from without and from within: in addition
to the expected implementation agencies, we find that the standard intensely
intertextual quotational quality of Japanese narratives is highly
self-implementational as well as self-referential. The process is
integrational, both in its entirety and in its parts, and the standard
narrative produced throughout is characterized by its syncretic integration of
elements that western standards tend to use in complementary distribution. It
is the complex integrational quality of process and product that lends cultural
idiosyncrasy as well as stability to the Japanese semiosphere.

Thomas Rimer (1995), Jennifer Railey (1997) and Haruo Shirane
(1998) all stress the continuity of a dual esthetic intrinsic to Japanese
culture that sets it apart from the western tradition. The oldest dual esthetic
and cultural values have been internalized by the master Japanese writers and
integrated over the centuries into a tightly knit literary tradition and a
holistic culture in which literary revolutions in the western sense have never
occurred. The distinctiveness of Japanese culture relies on the peculiarity of
its early historical national formation which took place through a dual
recurrent pendular process that alternated between phases of open cultural
contact with foreign powers and ensuing phases of political and cultural
isolation and restricted exchange. A later section will specify how this
pendular movement has taken place more than once and played an essential role
in Japanese history and culture. It has also shaped Japanese literary taste and
standards in idiosyncratic ways that reverse the western idea of literary
progress and change. The narrative patterns of Japanese medieval narrative run
counter to the western narratological expectancy that the older forms of a
pattern are less complex and sophisticated than their later developments and
that literary narrative grows from folk into high and from oral to written.
Regarding influence (between both individuals and cultures), the expectancy of
an anxiety of influence, as posited by Bloom (1973) in reference to leading
western writers, cannot be applied to the great Japanese authors. Some of the
historical reasons explaining these differences are given in the following
section.

3.1. Historical sources of
differential standardness in Japanese narrative

In Old Japan, high culture was associated from very early with
foreign Chinese classical culture. China’s influence came in a first wave of
cultural transfer that took place between the fourth and the ninth centuries,
when Japan borrowed immensely from China: Chinese erudition, Chinese
ideogrammatic writing, Chinese high art and literature, a new religion
(Buddhism), an efficient centralized administration, a centralized political
system led by an emperor. Paradoxically, these borrowings took cultural hold
not during the phase of exposure to intercultural contact but during the four
hundred years that followed, between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, when
commercial and political relations with China were forbidden. This period of
withdrawal became a golden age that saw the construction of the Japanese nation
and national culture, including a national literature, in terms of
Sino-Japanese hybrids. The high Chinese literary forms were juxtaposed with the
Japanese folk vernacular and adjusted to the Japanese narrative standard, which
is dual by definition (both high and low, sophisticated and bare, complex and
simple). Japanese literature was written not ideogrammatically but using
syllabic characters, called hiragana, which facilitated reading and
writing by substituting a set of simpler characters for the difficult Chinese
system of ideograms. Hiragana transcribed the sounds of oral Japanese
into signs of writing, and this gave impetus to a body of literature written in
Japanese hiragana characters that could be produced and read by the
merchant groups and samurai families that had no access to Chinese high
culture. In the Heian (794–1185 A.D.) and Kamakura (1185–1333 A.D.) periods,
Japanese Classical literature came into being, centuries before a similar
phenomenon took place in the west with the rise of the European national
literatures.

One particular aspect of this dual standardization process seems
to be of special relevance to the present argument: the traditional vernacular
forms of Japanese low culture (popular haikai poetry and the old folk
tales of oral transmission) were re-functionalized as a result of being
practiced and appreciated at the Imperial Court by cultivated courtiers among
whom women of the court played an essential role (Keene 1971). The great
classical narratives in Japanese originated in this period and were written by
court ladies, women from the low aristocracy who were the daughters and
granddaughters of high-brow male scholars, men who wrote their works in
Chinese. These highly literate women were ladies in waiting of the empresses
and wrote their Japanese prose in a special private code, omna moji, or
women’s writing.

The lady Murasaki Shikibu wrote the Tale of Genji (Genji
Monogatari) during the eleventh century. This tale, or monogatari,
was a hybrid of first-person diary and third-person omniscient narration, of
history and fiction, poetry and prose, literary criticism and literature. It
could hardly be described as a standard narrative from the western point of
view. Nevertheless, these women writers of the eleventh century selected a
low-culture product, the oral tale, and superimposed it onto the written hiragana
characters that elevated it from the low into the highest mode of written
narrative. This ultra-hybrid narrative form provided later Japanese writers
with a standard for writing narratives that became canonical within Japanese
culture, one that is intertextually alluded to in the more popular narratives
of the Tokugawa period and also in recent narrative. Through repeated
intertextual quotation, the Japanese tradition of narrative writing erased the
boundary between high and low that western literature so clearly draws. This
highly allusive quality of Japanese literature creates cohesion within the
semiosphere, as the act of creative renewal passes through the act of
remembrance of an old model: intertextual difference passes through sameness
and brings change through continuity instead of revolution or an anxiety of
influence.

For instance, the aristocratic values of The Tale of Genji
are replicated in the Tokugawa period by Basho’s popular narratives in the
early seventeenth century. Here, the aristocratic values from Court and city
were brought to town and commoner so that through intertextual reappropriation
they became culturally shared rather than questioned values. This is a movement
from high-low to low-high, resulting in ideological and aesthetic continuity
within change in Japanese literary standards. Early on in Japanese history, the
development of a holistic ideology, a stable esthetics (de Bary 1975, 1958) and
a persistently self-quotational literary standard made the Japanese literary
semiosphere differ from the traditional western divide between high (standard) and
popular (folk, substandard) culture that remained prevalent up until the time
of western postmodernity.

According to Shirane (1998), The Tale of Genji (Genji
Monogatari) has become truly canonical because it is a fountainhead for the
seasonal poetic topoi that have formed the heart of all subsequent Japanese
literature. Not only highbrow prose and poetry, but also the popular products
of haikai imagination from which seventeenth-century Edo Japanese haikai
poetry and haibun prose spring have explored the associative meanings
derived from the parallel relation drawn between the four seasons (Higginson
2008) and the human experience of the passage of time. Early on, The Tale of
Genji provided the horizon of meaning and the standard form for it which
the other significant writers in Japan have appropriated and integrated into
their own work so that what feels like standard storytelling to Japanese
readers of narrative and non-standard to western readers is one and the same
monogatari form.

Japanese culture started as early as the ninth century to develop
narrative forms that move inwards to stress the interior, psychological and
spiritual world of the characters portrayed. These Heian medieval novels employ
techniques for direct and indirect forms of speech and thought representation
that in the west characteristically started with Samuel Richardson and Jane
Austen, culminating in the modernist stream-of-consciousness technique. The use
of these techniques by early Japanese writers would make their works familiar
to modern western readers and completely unfamiliar to western readers from the
eleventh century. This historical inversion of the interior/exterior polarity
in narrative creates diachronic cross-cultural strangeness: when the
nineteenth-century Japanese writers of the Meiji era looked to the western
realist standard with a mind to modernization, they found that what was a
novelty to western realists – the rendering of characters’ subjective inner
states – was already part and parcel of the oldest classical Japanese literary
narrative standard. Inversely, modern Japanese fiction writers innovated by
moving in the opposite direction, focusing on the chronicle of the individual’s
external action they found typical of standard western realism. As said before,
standards are formed through a specified process and are subject to change.
They are socially and culturally bound, but they are also bound to time and
place – chronotropes in Bakhtin’s ([1937] 1981) sense of the term – and
therefore bound to change differently in different contexts.

The Japanese narrative standard has developed differently from
western standards also due to the sustained reciprocal influence of lyrical
poetry and prose that can be seen already in The Tale of Genji. Over the
centuries, that tendency created a distinctly Japanese literary semiosphere in
which the generic division between prose and lyrical poetry, traditional in
western literature and criticism, is effaced. While Japanese lyrical poetry
adopted narrative functions, Japanese narrative prose developed a persistent
strain of lyricism that is still part of Japanese modernity. Heian medieval
narratives like The Tale of Genji, as well as modern Japanese stories,
formally mix modes by juxtaposing represented oral and written discourse and by
placing descriptive and narrative prose alongside poems that advance the
narrative.

Here is an example taken from The Tale of Genji. At the
outset of the story, Genji is a child, not yet in his seventh year, who goes
into mourning for his mother, the Japanese emperor’s beautiful concubine. The
emperor is inconsolable and eventually sends a trusted gentlewoman, Myobu, to
the house of his deceased love to inquire about his son, little Genji, and to
let the boy’s widow grandmother know that he cares about them. Myobu is
respectfully welcomed by the old woman, who sheds tears at the sight of the
Emperor’s envoy and waits for her to deliver a message. The message comes to
her encoded in three successive modes: 1) oral mode (the part of the message
that has been received aurally by Myobu and memorized by her so as to be able
to transmit it orally and unchanged – in free direct style – to the old lady);
2) epistolary written mode (Myobu brings a letter from the Emperor for the old
lady to read); 3) the letter transmits its message in elegant prose until it
shifts to a short tanka poem that moves the old lady profoundly and
elicits her sincere answer, articulated in response to a poem’s verbal-visual
image and its associations.

This is the full passage:

[Myobu] delivered His Majesty's message.

“‘For a time I was sure that I must be dreaming, but now that the
turmoil in my mind has subsided, what I still find acutely painful is to have
no one with whom to talk over what needs to be done. Would you be kind enough
to visit me privately? I am anxious about my son and disturbed that he should
be surrounded everyday by such grieving. Please come soon.’

“He kept breaking into tears and never really managed to finish,
but he knew all too well, as I could see, that to another he might not be
looking very brave, and I felt so much for him that I hurried off to you before
I had actually heard all he had to say.” Then Myobu gave her His Majesty's
letter.

“Though tears darken my eyes,” the lady said, “by the light of his
most wise and gracious words…” And she began to read.

“I had thought that time might bring consolations to begin
lightening my sorrow, but as the passing days and months continue to disappoint
me, I hardly know how to bear my grief. Again and again my thoughts go to the
little boy, and it troubles me greatly that I cannot look after him with you.
Do come and see me in memory of days now gone…” He had written with deep
feeling and had added the poem:

“Hearing the wind sigh, burdening
with drops of dew all Miyagi Moor,

my heart helplessly goes out to
the littlehagi frond.”

But she could not read it to theend.

“Now that I know how painful it is to live long.” She said, “I am
ashamed to imagine what the pine must think of me, and for that reason
especially I would not dare to frequent His Majesty’s Seat. It is very good of
him to favour me with these repeated invitations, but I am afraid that I could
not possibly bring myself to go. His son, on the other hand, seems eager to do
so, although I am not sure just how much he understands, and while it saddens
me that he should feel that way, I cannot blame him. Please let His Majesty
know these, my inmost thoughts […]” (Murasaki Shikibu [b. 978?] 2001: 8)

According to Tyler’s footnotes to his translation (2001: 8), the
Emperor’s poem means, indirectly: “As the sad winds of change sweep through the
palace, they bring tears to my eyes, and my heart goes out to my little boy.” The
boy, Genji, is poetically referred to by means of an allusion to a plant, Hagi,
an autumn flowering plant whose long graceful fronds can be easily tossed and
tangled by the wind. Miyagino, east of present Sendau, is often associated with
hagi in poetry, and here the miya of Miyagino also suggests the
palace (miya). Thus the Emperor’s poem refers, in the fiction, through
intertextual allusion, to earlier allusions made in the old Japanese book of
poetry, Kokinshu.[6] The old lady’s answer in the
fiction also alludes to Kokin Rokujo, a historically dated poem in which
the poet laments feeling even older than the pine of Tasakago, a common poetic
exemplar of longevity, and thus she indirectly conveys her meaning: she does
not want others to know that she lives on after her daughter’s death. She is
ashamed to imagine what the pine (indirect reference to the emperor) must think
of her, an old useless woman who should have died instead of her young
daughter, the emperor’s lover and Genji’s mother. Here the literal allusion to
the pine has a factual referent (the old standing Tasakago pine tree literarily
famous for its longevity), which becomes an intertextual referent (the Tasakago
pine tree as a topos for longevity in Japanese literature) and a
symbolic referent (the pine image indirectly represents the Emperor).

The analysis of this passage aims to demonstrate, through an
example, the haiku-like compressed way in which narrative meaning is conveyed
in The Tale of Genji. Images replace the literalness of the telling in
the narrative and increase its poeticity by showing that the emperor father is
the pine under whose shadow the graceful hagi plant (the child Genji) should
grow up. This textual preference for the highly indirect presentation of
meaning is non-standard in western narrative but dominant and perfectly normal
(in the sense of ‘expected’) in Japanese literature. On the other hand, this
passage from The Tale of Genji exemplifies the way in which the novel
formally juxtaposes descriptive prose, narrative prose and lyrical poetry
within one text. Brief tanka poems recurrently occupy the place of
direct speech in a novel that is a perfectly dual composite of prose and
poetry, radically violating western expectations for an eleventh-century
narrative. The differential standards of Japanese narrative are exogenous to
the western semiosphere, and the contrast may serve narratology to revise and
explain its conceptualization of what may be simple or complex, old or modern,
normal or not in a narrative and do it from a non-biased, explicitly situated
vantage point of analysis.

The same haiku-like compression of meaning derived from a
non-standard treatment of narrative meaning, by its presentation through a
syncretic (image-word) (poetry-prose) narrative text, can be found when
comparing the narratives of Japanese Heian Court classics from the tenth
century, for instance, The Tale of Genji and the haibun travel
narratives developed by Basho in the late seventeenth century. Basho’s haibun
travel diaries modulates meaning through passages in prose and Haiku
poems that advance/describe the action in parallel. Here the prose explains the
poem, and the poem supports the prose. The Heian standard reverberates in Basho
and also in twentieth-century westernized novelists like Kawabata who keep the
traditional Japanese model within their highly poetic all-prose narratives by
having an image precipitate an action or by introducing into the plot extended
moments of introspection that make these narratives seem non-standard to the
conventional western reader for the essentially poetic revelatory power of
their imagistic prose.

3.2. A diachronic approach to
intercultural hybridization: Standards in contact

Consistently mixed-register narrativity has been standard in
Japanese literature throughout its history. In the west, similarly hybrid forms
of narrative have not been theorized as common till recently, but they are now
associated with non-standard high modernist narrative writing, especially in
late modernism. For this reason, they have received critical attention. McHale
(2009), among others, has studied the rise of narrative forms in postmodern
poetry. Peter Hühn and Jens Kiefer (2005), among others, have studied the
narrative elements of lyric poetry. What remains to be fully acknowledged is
the direct influence of Japanese literary standards on the rise of western
imagism and, indirectly through the latter (cf. Pound 1913; T. E. Hulme 1924),
on modernist literary narrative. In that case, the rise of more complex, hybrid,
non-standard forms of narrativity in western modernity would be explainable in
terms of intercultural contact (Arrowsmith 2011) rather than as inner progress
from simple to complex. In terms of literary standardness, the western
“realist” narrative standard prevalent in the second half of the twentieth
century was replaced by an avant-garde textuality which, in time, would become
the modernist standard, a textuality very much aware of past western narrative
conventions on account, partly, of a new familiarity with non-western, Chinese
and Japanese literary and cultural conventions gained through access to eastern
texts in translation (cf. Pound 1928). It cannot be a coincidence that,
following post-Meiji intercultural contacts between east and west, a second
phase of modernization of western literary narrative standards has taken place
through modernist and late modernist experimentation with previously
non-standard forms of narrative management of fact and fiction. Starting with
the “New Writing” in the 1930s and since, we have seen genres such as the
non-fiction novel, faction, low-fantasy fiction and many genres problematizing
the real as well as the pre-modern western assumption that there is a clear-cut
boundary between the fictional and the factual (non-fiction). It cannot be
forgotten that these new western genres – now quickly becoming part of the
postmodern standard – question the traditional western polarity (fiction vs.
non-fiction) much like the Japanese literary narratives have questioned it since
the time of the Heian classics.

An additional source of differential standardness in Japanese
narratives is their traditional conflation of fact and fiction. Stemming from a
traditionally held Japanese belief in the superior truth value of facts over
the figments of imagination, Japanese fiction writers have, from their Heian
beginnings (cf. Struve 2010), sought validation for their work by grounding
fiction in actual fact: for instance, by using actual contemporary incidents
and local news as their source of plot and character, by close observation of
daily life, by using historical characters in imaginary situations, and, more
subtly, by the intertextual use of old literary matter whose factual existence
in literary history becomes a warrant of validity (Oura 2010). This is what the
western historical novel, starting with Scott, has done more recently. Ian
Watt’s (1957) Rise of theNovel attributes the origins of the
English novel precisely to this kind of approach to narrative that the Japanese
have practiced from the ninth century onwards. It would be interesting to
consider the possibility that sea-travelling and cultural contact with the east
and Japan had an impact on the first modernization phase of western narrative
standards resulting in the rise of the early modern European novel. This
hypotesis will be developed further in the last section as part of the
conclusions because it seems more than feasible, especially when contemplated
in the light of an analogous second standardization process taking place later
in history: the western recodification process opening up into (post)modernism
that was started by the imagists’ theoretical rethinking of Chinese and
Japanese haiku aesthetics. The impact of Pound’s and Hulme’s imagistic
reconceptualization of the relation between image and word, within both poetry
and narrative, derived from their knowledge of the east and their masterly
understanding of haiku-like writing and its revolutionary management of
the relation between language meaning and literary representation
(Penas-Ibáñez 2006). If, before modernism, western thought and
criticism assumed the existence of a clear-cut interpretative boundary between
literal and figurative, image and word, prose and poetry, or between fiction
and fact (non-fiction), more recent criticism and narrative study has had to
acknowledge and explain the hybridizing change in narrative standards brought
by the cosmopolitan modernists in the western literary semiosphere. Paul
Ricœur wrote his three-volume Temps et récit (1983–1985) to
acknowledge this (post)modernist situation, studying both historiography and
fiction within a new formulation of hermeneutics. Ricœur argues for an
interpretative style attentive at once to categorization (fact-fiction), but
also to preservation of “the dynamism of meaning” through the use and
experience of metaphor. Metaphor vivifies, brings to life the meanings fixed in
dead linguistic formulae. The experience of metaphor causes “a ‘thinking more’
at the conceptual level. This struggle to ‘think more’, guided by the
‘vivifying principle’, is the soul of interpretation” (Ricœur [1975] 1977:
303). Ricœur brings to the theory of linguistic interpretation the same
metaphor-based/image-based approach that, sixty years before, Pound and Hulme
applied to the theory of linguistic-literary representation – an approach
rooted in their awareness of alternative standards in the east.

4. Conclusion

Summing up, cultural modernization has been taking place in both
the east and the west over centuries. This process has entailed changes in
narrative standards that are perceived to be necessary for the continuity of a
given culture. Such changes occur through processes of standardization that
package cultural products in newly structured formats according to selection
and codification, elaboration and implementation of the most adequate
structures within a given communication system. These cultural changes can be
perceived in different ways. A cultural past and its standard products, the
standard forms in which the community customarily communicates, may seem
beautiful, indicative of a shared identity and deserving cultural extension to
new members. But the past may also seem passé and useless to them. Each
perception causes its own kind of anxiety: by and large, the former attitude
characterizes Japanese culture while the latter one is characteristic of
western (post)modernity.

The anxieties over cultural modernization in Japan have arisen out
of circumstances which are quite different from those in the west. In Japan,
modernization has taken place along with waves of foreign influence.
Modernization has been accompanied by the fear of losing touch with a cherished
core of Japanese identity, which is dual. The response to this fear has been
the preservation of old and new in a highly syncretic (hybrid) standard form of
narrative. If, as Rimer says “in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., for
example, Japan might have been defined in our contemporary parlance as a ‘third
world country’” (Rimer 1995: 6), this would be so in relation to Rimer’s perception
or extrapolation of a situation in the past when the Japanese were an
illiterate people over which China began to exert a political and cultural
influence that would be felt for centuries. This first phase of openness to
Chinese High culture lasted from the fourth to the eleventh century, but
already by the seventh and eighth centuries the Japanese courtiers could use
the two languages, Chinese and Japanese, in a diglossic distribution of
functions productive of two different potential standards. Japanese was the
language of orality, affect and private matters while Chinese became the high
language for the expression of abstract ideas in writing.

This cultural dualism was confirmed during the period of cultural
isolation extending from the ninth to the thirteenth century, when Japan broke
off relations with China and secluded itself, thus giving way to a dynamics
that is well known in studies of intercultural exchange: the seclusion phase
became a culturally productive period, a golden age, when the borrowings from
Chinese culture were properly assimilated and nationally appropriated,
selected, recodified, elaborated and institutionally implemented. The Tale
of Genji and the other Heian classics are intercultural Sino-Japanese
hybrids that have become a source of traditional Japanese identitarian values,
a canonical standard within the Japanese literary semiosphere that remains the
reference point for Japanese narrative writing. But also a source of influences
for western modern writing through intercultural contact and borrowing.

Cultural borrowing has recurred twice again in Japanese history,
this time with an impact on the west. From the thirteenth to the sixteenth
century, Japan opened up again to contact with foreign powers, with China as
before and, at the end of the period, with the early modern western maritime
empires. The Europeans (mainly Spanish/Dutch at the beginning) were named namban,
barbarians from the South, although they brought European technology to Japan
as well as a new religion that dynamized the lower classes. The fear of being
invaded and subjected to forms of colonization of the type dominant in the
South-American continent provoked a Japanese reaction. A second era of 250
years of cultural seclusion started in 1653 that was used by the Japanese to
digest foreign influence and renovate the old traditional arts in a second
golden age, the age of Basho and haikai literature (haibun prose
and renga poetry), of Nôh theatre, of ukiyo and the
secularization of culture. Socially, the appearance of a four-class system
(nobility, samurai, villagers and urban dwellers, the latter consisting of
merchants and artisans) resulted in a power shift that relegated the Emperor to
a formal role and placed a shogun at the head of a Japan-specific kind of
feudal republic. This period in Japanese history is evolutionary rather than
revolutionary, entailing succession at a par with explosion, to use Lotman's
([1992] 2009) terms. In the middle of it, Basho refashions the Japanese
cultural past into modernizing cultural forms that remap the national past, as
represented by works such as The Tale of Genji, by means of allusion,
parody, quotation or plain emulation. At the same time, during the seventeenth
century, we see the rise of the novel in Spain, the western colonial empire
that had stronger links with Japan at the time (through the Jesuits and
Seville’s trade) in a case of mutual influence. A century later the rise of the
English novel would take place along the same lines, perhaps for analogous
reasons. The Spanish picaresque novel, just as TomJones and Tom
Sawyer later, are the perfect western embodiment of haibun, a haiku-like
narrative – highly ironic, mixed-register narrative prose, full of cultural
references and of a highly intertextual quality that is well exemplified by
Basho’s haiku writing and travel narratives. In view of these
developments, it does not seem too far-fetched to say that Japanese literature
underwent a standardization process resulting in an early literary modernism
before its time in the west, while western culture started its own literary
modernizing process at that moment of intercultural contact by producing early
modern realist narratives whose standard form was to reach a climax in the
realist novel during the second half of the nineteenth century, just at the
time the Meiji era was opening up the path to a renewed intercultural flow that
brought with it both the western modernist revision of the first early modern
western standard and the Japanese revision of its own traditional syncretic
standard.

In other words, the last phase of cultural contact between Japan
and the west, starting in the Meiji era, has dynamized the overall semiosphere
with new standard forms of narrative being produced both in Japan and in the
west which are unmistakably intercultural, (post)modernist and hybrid in
nature. These new standards have been developing in recent decades both in the
east and the west as forms of global (post)modernism. We can agree, at least
partly, with McHale’s most recent nuanced position on Postmodernism that he
defines as “less like the recognition of a shared, universal
literary-historical situation and more like the appropriation of ‘Third World’
esthetic practices by ‘First World’ cultural authorities” (McHale 2013: 361).
He uses the example of magical realism and the Boom in Latin American
literature as evidence for the existence of a third-world postmodernism before
western first-world postmodernism. I find in the Japanese case evidence in
support of a definition of postmodernism more reliant on the condition of
intercultural contact than on a specifically colonial or postcolonial relation.
I would say, expanding McHale’s definition, that postmodernism is not a Boom
but a boomerang. It entails not just a simple hybridization moment, “the
appropriation of ‘Third World’ esthetic practices by ‘First World’ cultural
authorities”; it also triggers the more complex moment of hybridizing
appropriation of ‘First World’ esthetic standard practices by ‘Other Worlds’
cultural authorities who are aware of the modernizing force of this
boomerang-like dual standardizing dynamics.

It is only against the backdrop of esthetic conventions prevalent
in a specifically defined sociocultural milieu that the standardness of a narrative
form may be borrowed, appropriated and transformed into another culture so that
there may be innovation and mutual rapport. Western narratives like Ulysses,
In Our Time, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Garden of Eden,
Speak Memory or Molloy, or Japanese narratives like Soseki’s I
am a Cat, Kawabata’s Snow Country, Enchi’s Masks, Oe’s The
Changeling, Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, Yoshimoto’s The Lake –
like old haibun narrative prose and haiku poetry – exemplify
textual-generic and cultural hybridity to perfection. They would be the best
examples of the new haiku-like ultra-hybrid (post)modernist standard.

Notes

[1] The
adjective ‘realist’ as used here alludes specifically to nineteenth-century
realism.

[2] In fact,
‘spontaneous’ is one of the senses of natural that Fludernik acknowledges in Towards
a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996) on level III in her analytical model. She
says: “storytelling is a general and spontaneous human activity observable in
all cultures, it provides individuals with culturally discrete patterns of
storytelling […] and particularly an ability to distinguish between different kinds
or types of stories” (44).

[3] It should
be noted that in general linguistics the meaning of the term ‘natural’ in the
expression “natural language” contrasts specifically with the meaning of the
term ‘artificial’ in “artificial language.” The ongoing discussion on the
inadequacy of the term ‘natural’ for the meaning ‘standard’ in the expression
“natural narrative” does not apply here. For instance, natural language refers
to English, French, etc. and artificial language to 1) composite languages made
up of several different languages (this could also be “newspeak” in 1984)
or 2) computer languages.

[4] The
question remains as to whether some narratives are more standard than others.
Prague School semiotics differentiates between two standards – folk tales and
high literature – in terms of simple versus double foregrounding or, in
Mukařovský’s terms, “unstructured vs. structured esthetic” ([1948]
1964: 31). What is interesting for us in this semiotic explanation is the
acknowledgment of a plurality of standards relative to the existing
cultural and literary polyphony. This theoretical position departs from the
Saussurean semiological concept and application of one norm as “the” standard.

[5] Noam
Chomsky’s 1957 Syntactic Structures opened linguistics up to a
proto-cognitive theory of language in which there is 1) an underlying grammar
universally shared by humans, 2) a competence in a particular language which is
made up of a few general grammar rules shared by all the members of a community
and 3) a set of transformation rules that explain the diversity of social
performance. Later, cognitivism departs from Chomsky’s model but does not
challenge its claim to universalism.

[6]Kokinshu
means, in Japanese: “Collection from Ancient and Modern Times.” It is the first
anthology of Japanese poetry compiled upon Imperial order, by several poets, in
905, a few decades before The Tale of Genji was written. The collection
comprises 1111 poems, many of them anonymous, divided into twenty books arranged
by topic. The most memorable among them are flawlessly turned miniature
seasonal poems, love poems, travel poems and mourning poems that form, since
then, a literary repertoire shared by the cultivated Japanese.